OCTOBER 31, 2021 – I grew up in the “Halloween Capital of the World” (Anoka, MN). My wife, who didn’t grow up with world domination (Byron, IL), is skeptical. “A place doesn’t become a world capital of anything,” she asserts, “simply by saying so.”
But we Anokans backed words with action.
In the 1920s local youth went overboard on Halloween, hoisting hay wagons onto rooftops and bashing pumpkins on driveways. In wise response, the town leaders decided to embrace Halloween.
They made a clean sweep. A witch on a broom was added to official city letterhead. Sidewalk corners in downtown Anoka were graced with a permanent, black and orange graphic—again, featuring a witch on a broom—and big Halloween banners proclaiming Anoka’s world capital status were strung up across Main Street for weeks leading up to Halloween. A Halloween window painting contest was unleashed across all storefronts.
By the 1960s, Halloween traditions in Anoka were well ensconced. On Halloween morning, every grade-school kid received a brown paper bag of treats: a cornball the size of a softball, covered in shiny, colorful paper; a dozen chunks of taffy, six wrapped in black waxed paper, six in orange; and for ballast, lots of peanuts in the shell. You tried to pace yourself on cornball and taffy so you didn’t wind up with only peanuts before trick-or-treating—the limited time between supper and the official Halloween events of the evening.
Little happened academically on Halloween. In the morning we attended an assembly featuring some kind of entertainment, after which came distribution of the above-described treat bags. Younger kids paraded through lower-grade classrooms to review Halloween art on display. After lunch was the costume competition, which some kids (and their moms) took seriously. Several moms in each class served as volunteer judges. If your mom bought your costume at Ben Franklin or Jensen’s Five-and-Dime (or in a pinch, at Anoka Drug), you didn’t stand a chance, but if you came up with an idea and put your mom to work on it a month advance, you just might win a prize or . . . an “honorable mention” ribbon, as I did in fifth grade for my Daniel Boone costume. A student parade down Main Street consumed the rest of the school day.
In the evening, the Anoka Tornadoes football team hosted the “Pumpkin Bowl” at the high-school field, which was an old, classic bowl-shaped arena, quite fancy for our town. A large Pumpkin Bowl button got you in free. As part of a civic fund-raising effort in advance of Halloween, we grade-school kids sold buttons—three sizes, three prices—door-to-door.
Immediately following the game was a big parade through down-town Anoka. Our family watched from inside the courthouse, where Dad worked. Sheltered from the cold, we had a wide-angle view of the parade, as if we had box seats for the biggest event of the year.
I ask my readers, now fully informed: How could any other town compete with Anoka as Halloween Capital of the World?
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
